Russ Vought and the Paperwork Revolution

Forget rally rants—this architect of Project 2025 is dismantling democracy through HR forms and executive orders.

May 20, 2025

Trump taps Project 2025 co-author to lead White House budget office • Michigan Advance

This is the second in Critical Resistance’s new profile series. If you missed the first on Stephen Miller, you can find that here and the follow-up strategy guide here. Once you’ve read his profile, read the accompanying strategy guide, How to Break the Blueprint: A Tactical Guide to Russ Vought’s 180-Day Power Grab.

Note: Impoundment is when the executive branch refuses to spend funds Congress has already approved, essentially overriding the legislature by doing nothing.

He doesn’t look like a threat. He doesn’t rant on cable news or pound a lectern. He simply writes the plans.

Russell T. Vought—once Donald Trump’s budget director, now the principal architect of the 920-page Project 2025 “Mandate for Leadership”—is quietly assembling what may be the most radical re-engineering of the federal government in modern U.S. history. His blueprint would sweep away civil-service protections, concentrate executive power, and embed an explicitly Christian-nationalist worldview across every department.

Unlike the populists who perform rage onstage, Vought draws no energy from applause; his weapon is procedure. As head of the Office of Management and Budget he learned that control of forms and footnotes can move billions of dollars and thousands of jobs. Now, from his Center for Renewing America war-room, he is sharpening those tools for a second Trump term.

He calls the idea “radical constitutionalism.” Critics call it soft-spoken authoritarianism.

What follows is not just a profile of one man; it is a warning about how democracy can be rewritten in the language of process—by people who already know where every wire runs and intend to cross them.

The Ideologue Behind the Desk

Russ Vought rarely raises his voice and never performs on Twitter/X. His convictions are sufficiently settled that performance feels redundant; you hear the extremism only when you listen to the words, not the tone.

His worldview locked in early. “I accepted Jesus at age four,” he’s recalled, framing it not as an emotional altar-call but as the moment truth became fact to him. From then on, scripture supplied the metrics: truth is biblical, authority God-given, and the state should mirror both.

Wheaton College, the evangelical flagship that treats faith as public mission, reinforced that lens, as did a law degree and a decade inside hard-right policy shops, culminating in the No. 2 slot at Heritage Action. The beliefs never softened; they simply acquired better tools.

Those tools, and the worldview behind them, became public in 2017, when a resurfaced blog post defended Wheaton’s firing of a professor who said Muslims and Christians worship the same God. “They do not know God … and they stand condemned,” Vought wrote, labeling the claim “heresy.”

At his OMB confirmation hearing, Senator Bernie Sanders asked whether someone who brands millions of Americans “condemned” could serve a pluralistic republic. Vought didn’t hedge: “I’m a Christian.” No outrage, no apology; only certainty.

That affect—cool, unblinking conviction—has followed him ever since. Cable-news culture warriors chase likes; Vought quietly rewrites procedure. He isn’t trying to win the argument; he is writing the rules that decide who argues at all.

Vought’s rebuttal: Asked later about the exchange, he framed Sanders’s line of questioning as “a religious test the Constitution forbids” and said his goal is merely to restore “the founders’ vision of limited, accountable government.”

And that, precisely, is the danger: a man whose faith tells him the outcome is pre-decided and who now knows how every lever of government can be pulled to ensure it.

Trump’s Budget General

When Russ Vought arrived at the Office of Management and Budget in early 2017, Washington barely noticed. OMB is where the federal government files its homework: spreadsheets, line items, regulatory cost–benefit analyses. But Vought understood that if you control those footnotes, you can bend the entire bureaucracy to your will. Over the next four years he used that insight to conduct a slow-motion stress test of American governance.

He began with money. In February 2020, after Congress refused to fund a border wall, Vought signed off on a re-programming request that shifted $3.8 billion from Pentagon weapons accounts to wall construction. It was a quiet demonstration that the power of the purse could be gamed by anybody who knew the right budget codes.

A year earlier he had discovered an even sharper lever: delay. On July 25, 2019, hours after Trump’s now-famous phone call with Volodymyr Zelensky, OMB issued a “programmatic hold” on $391 million in Ukraine security aid. The freeze would become the factual core of Trump’s first impeachment, yet Vought defended it as a routine assertion of the president’s “constitutional right to delay.”

Culture war? He could do that too. Memo M-20-37, released just before the 2020 election, ordered every department and every contractor to scrub training material that mentioned “critical race theory” or “white privilege.” In a single stroke, an administrative memo converted a Fox-News talking point into federal procurement law.

And then there was Schedule F. Signed in the season’s final hours, the order would have allowed tens of thousands of policy specialists to be re-classified as “excepted service”—in plain English, fire-at-will. Biden canceled it on Day 2; Trump revived a pared-back version on January 20, 2025.

Vought’s tenure never made splashy cable-news reels. The most revealing clip is a press scrum from February 2020: a reporter asks whether more Ukraine-style funding freezes are coming. Vought smiles blandly, “I don’t anticipate it” and walks off. It is the calm of a man who knows that the real action happens in margin notes the public never sees.

His first test back at OMB came only four days into the new term. On January 23, 2025, an unsigned “spending review” memo, drafted inside OMB on Vought’s return, froze all federal grant outlays until further notice. School-nutrition programs, Head Start centers, and state disaster offices reported payments vanishing overnight, prompting emergency lawsuits and bipartisan protests. Faced with the backlash, the White House quietly rescinded the freeze after forty-eight hours, but the episode advertised Vought’s willingness to weaponize the purse at scale and speed.

The political blowback carried straight into his confirmation fight. Democrats staged an all-night Senate protest branding him “the architect of a hostile takeover of government,” yet every Republican stood by him; Vought was confirmed 53-47 on a strict party-line vote.

Out of Office, Into Overdrive

Russ Vought left the West Wing with no TV contract, no book tour, and no interest in rehab-era respectability. Instead, within three weeks of Biden’s inauguration he launched the Center for Renewing America (CRA)—a think-tank in name, a war-room in practice. The mission statement on its website is blunt: “renew a consensus of America as a nation under God.” Court filings show that in August 2023 Vought’s 22-year marriage ended quietly in Arlington County.

What followed was less analysis than mobilization:

Building a parallel Cabinet:
CRA and the Heritage-led Project 2025 opened an online pipeline that held 4,000+ résumés in 2023 with an internal goal of up to 54,000 vetted loyalists ready to parachute into every agency on Day One.
Training for a purge:
In undercover video released August 15, 2024, Vought boasts to two would-be donors that he’s already “written about 350 different documents, regulations and action memos, for Day One,” calls Trump’s public distance from Project 2025 “graduate-level politics,” and says 80% of his own time goes to “destroying [agencies’] notion of independence.” He caps the pitch by praising “a Christian nationalism approach.”

Drafting the theology:
A leaked CRA memo listed “Christian Nationalism” as a deliverable for the next administration, alongside directives to invoke the Insurrection Act and ignore congressional funding controls. Politico later confirmed the push to infuse Christian-nationalist language across executive orders.
Synchronizing the constellation:
CRA writes the policy architecture; Heritage hosts the 920-page Mandate for Leadership; America First Legal (Stephen Miller) prepares the lawsuits and defenses. The three orgs share staff, donors, and a single objective: executive supremacy insulated from future elections.

By early 2025, Vought had turned a post-government sabbatical into the nerve center of a movement that treats bureaucracy as occupied territory. Capitol-Hill allies now float him for White House chief-of-staff; he demurs, noting that the title matters less than the wiring. Either way, the blueprint is finished—and the personnel to run it are already packing their go-bags.

The Blueprint Wasn’t for Trump. It Was for Power

When Heritage unveiled the 920-page Mandate for Leadership in April 2023, most journalists skimmed for culture-war buzzwords. The real story was structure. Every chapter ends with the same timed checklist—Day 1, Day 30, Day 180—so that loyalists with zero institutional memory can follow a deployment guide: revoke these rules, sign these orders, re-classify these employees, replace them with those names.

At the heart of the machinery is Schedule F. President Trump reinstated it as Schedule Policy/Career (PC) with EO 14171 at 12:18 p.m. on Inauguration Day. OPM guidance now gives agencies 90 days to submit preliminary conversion rosters and another 120 to finalize them. By late spring tens of thousands of positions will be open to replacement and Heritage’s résumé bank is already standing by.

OPM crystalized that timetable in a January 27th draft rule, giving agencies 90 days to submit preliminary conversion lists and another 120 to finalize them. Within a week, the AFGE and AFSCME unions sued in federal court, calling Schedule PC an unconstitutional attempt to purge non-partisan staff.

Once that fuse is lit, the blueprint escalates:

Pull every “independent” agency into the White House slipstream. EO 14215 (Feb 18, 2025) has already forced the Fed’s supervisory arm, the FTC, SEC and FCC to route rules, budgets, even press releases through the West Wing.
Starve programs by reviving impoundment. An OMB memo now in court argues the 1974 Impoundment Control Act is unconstitutional. Treasury is using that rationale to freeze billions in Inflation Reduction Act grants.
Prepare force. CRA training decks coach Homeland-Security liaisons on invoking the Insurrection Act within twenty-four hours if mass protests erupt.

The agenda’s animating premise is theological. Leaked CRA documents list “Christian nationalism” as a formal deliverable; William Wolfe, Vought’s ideological lieutenant, has written that only those “who affirm Christ’s lordship over civil affairs” should serve in government. Once Schedule PC clears the floor, those litmus tests move from rhetoric to HR paperwork.

The Next Test Case: Public Broadcasting
On April 28, 2025 Trump tried to remove three of the five directors of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting; on May 1 he signed an order telling every agency to cut off all grants and contracts with NPR, PBS, and their affiliates. CPB immediately sued, and filings revealed DOGE aides had attempted to “embed” a review team inside the corporation within hours of the firing notice—evidence, CPB argued, of an unlawful bid to seize control before the funding ban took effect.

Day 120: Where the Sprint Stands

We are four months into the Trump–Vance term, fifty-five percent of the way through Vought’s 180-day plan.

Schedule PC conversions are underway; agencies have delivered their first lists to OPM.
Every major independent regulator now clears work through the White House gatekeeper established by EO 14215.
Impoundment theory is live: Treasury and OMB have paused large climate-grant tranches—including a quiet $38 million FEMA upgrade for the Emergency Alert System that vanished from the payment queue in March, a move plaintiffs cite as proof of “backdoor impoundment”—while six multistate suits and one temporary restraining order work their way through the courts.
Personnel surge is real: Heritage confirms its database exceeds 20,000 résumés and is being scaled for 54,000.
Security drills are done: Homeland-Security officials have walked through CRA paperwork for deploying troops under the Insurrection Act.
Budget rift inside the GOP: Vought’s FY 2026 blueprint caps defense spending at $892 billion, angering Republican hawks who want a post-Ukraine buildup and underscoring how completely he now sets the party’s fiscal terms.

With sixty days left, the disruptive phase (mass firings, department restructures) will land just as Congress enters midsummer appropriations chaos. That schedule is no accident.

Musk in, Musk out—Vought Ascendant

Donald Trump hired Elon Musk in January to run the new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), unleashing headline-grabbing “efficiency raids” on dozens of agencies. By May 15th, Musk announced he was “stepping back” to focus on SpaceX, leaving his cost-cutting portfolio in Vought’s hands. Insiders say the swap trades spectacle for staying power: “The wrecking ball just got a project manager,” one senior aide quipped.

Beyond the Blueprint: A Theocratic Autocracy

In CRA white papers Vought warns that America’s crisis is “spiritual, not merely political,” and that the nation must recover its “covenantal identity.” Those papers point directly to policy. The Mandate for Leadership chapter on Health and Human Services, for instance, instructs appointees to resurrect the long-dormant Comstock Act so that abortion pills can be intercepted in the mail. Another chapter urges the Justice Department to redefine “sex” as biological, laying groundwork to roll back LGBTQ civil-rights precedent. Draft orders Politico compared with the Project 2025 blueprint lift passages almost verbatim, a pattern that tracks with William Wolfe’s own writing. Wolfe, a contributing editor to the 2023 “Statement on Christian Nationalism,” urges the United States to “formally … acknowledge the Lordship of Christ” in its laws.

Once the structural levers lock (Schedule PC purge, EO 14215 funnel, impoundment authority) the theological agenda can flow through rule-making, immune to most congressional vetoes. Vought calls this “radical constitutionalism.” A plainer name would be quiet theocracy by administrative memo.

Not Just One Man: The Network That Sustains Him

Project 2025 is less a think-tank report than a supply chain. Russ Vought’s Center for Renewing America (CRA) writes the executive-order packets and trains future political appointees behind closed doors. Just across town, the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 team updates the 920-page Mandate for Leadership and maintains a résumé database that already tops twenty thousand vetted names with capacity for 54,000 if a hiring surge is needed.

Once the paperwork and people are ready, Stephen Miller’s America First Legal steps in. Its lawyers pre-draft lawsuits and amicus briefs aimed at blunting the inevitable injunctions the new rules will face, while a parallel track coordinates with friendly state attorneys-general so the legal fight begins on multiple fronts at once.

Around those three hubs spins a ring of amplifiers. Steve Bannon’s War Room, Tucker Carlson’s streaming platform, and a constellation of MAGA influencers recycle the same “deep-state” and “radical constitutionalism” talking points, often quoting CRA memos verbatim. On Capitol Hill, Freedom-Caucus members routinely share oversight-letter drafts with Vought’s shop before they go public, ensuring congressional sound bites sync perfectly with executive-branch moves.

Redundancy is designed in. If a federal judge freezes a regulation, America First Legal files parallel suits elsewhere to limit the reach of that injunction. If staffing bottlenecks appear, Heritage taps its “academy” alumni to fill the gap. And if mainstream coverage turns hostile, Bannon’s network floods social feeds within hours, framing push-back as proof that “elites fear real reform.” Heritage has even funded a $100,000 “accountability project” run by the American Accountability Foundation to publish lists of “disloyal” career staff—starting with 100 Homeland Security employees—deepening what unions call “blacklist terror” inside the bureaucracy.

As Vought told one private briefing, “A single man can be neutralized; a distributed system cannot.” The network’s whole purpose is to make sure the architecture he drafted keeps advancing, even if any one node takes a hit.

Timeline: From Evangelical Aide to Blueprint Architect

1999–2004: Wheaton College B.A.; earns a GW Law degree; staffs Rep. Mike Pence. Begins calling the United States “a covenantal nation.”

2010–2016: Vice-president at Heritage Action. Uses scorecards and primary threats to pull the GOP rightward and help sink bipartisan immigration reform.

Mar 2017: Nominated deputy director, Office of Management & Budget.

Jan 2019-Jul 2020: Becomes acting, then Senate-confirmed, OMB director. Drafts Memo M-20-37 (CRT ban) and the original Schedule F order.

Jan 2021: Leaves the White House; launches the Center for Renewing America three weeks later.

Apr 2023: Co-releases Heritage’s 920-page Mandate for Leadership (Project 2025).

Aug 2024: Undercover video shows Vought boasting of “350 Day-One memos” and spending “80% of my time” on breaking agency independence.

Oct 2024: Leaked donor briefing: “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected.”

Jan 20, 2025 (Day 0): EO 14171 revives Schedule F/PC; agencies get 210 days to re-classify policy staff.

Feb 18, 2025 (Day 29): EO 14215 funnels Fed supervision, FTC, SEC, FCC and other regulators through a White-House gatekeeper.

May 2025 (Day 120): Preliminary Schedule PC lists circulate; Treasury freezes IRA climate grants under an impoundment theory now in court; Homeland-Security liaisons finish Insurrection-Act invocation drills.

When the Bureaucrats Become the Theocrats

If Project 2025 completes its arc, the federal workforce will do more than answer to the Oval Office—it will speak with one theological voice. Schedule PC supplies the purge mechanism; the Mandate for Leadership supplies the replacement manuals; and the personnel pipeline makes sure the new hires already share an explicitly Christian-nationalist worldview.

Vought’s private briefings are blunt about the cultural aim: break the “secular stronghold” inside government, then rebuild it as a covenantal state. In leaked videos he promises to leave career staff “traumatically affected” and walks new appointees through draft paperwork for invoking the Insurrection Act against “mass unrest” within twenty-four hours of taking power.

Two executive orders signed in the first 60 days show how swiftly that vision moves from PowerPoint to policy. EO 14171 resurrected Schedule PC, giving agencies 210 days to re-classify policy roles; EO 14215 already funnels every significant rule, budget, and press release from the Fed’s supervisory arm to the smallest commission through a White-House gatekeeper.

Once those structural levers lock, the substantive agenda: national abortion bans via Comstock, rollback of LGBTQ civil-rights precedent, faith-based hiring tests, can be advanced through regulation rather than statute, largely immune to congressional speed bumps. A distributed network of litigators and media surrogates stands ready to swat away injunctions and reframe any resistance as proof that “elites fear reform.”

The upshot is as simple as it is unsettling: the decisive battle over whether the United States remains a pluralistic republic is taking place inside HR forms, clearance packets, and budget footnotes with a moral code embedded between the lines. Vought calls it radical constitutionalism. But the truth is simpler: quiet theocracy—drafted, staffed, and signed into law.

Now that you are familiar with the threat, read the follow-up strategy guide, How to Break the Blueprint: A Tactical Guide to Russ Vought’s 180-Day Power Grab.

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